Things to avoid

How about,

I came to in this grotty little barn -it was dreadful, my head ached, my clothes were torn, how did I get there? WHAM - flashback to when I was two years old, and I remember it sooooooooo vividly.

I've seen in some memoirs a sense of passivity that I don't like--as though these people are spectators in their own lives, and they are reporting it, instead of reacting to it.

I would have said "creating" as well, but some biographies and autobiographies seem to be centered around circumstances that changed the author/subjects' lives, like war or 9/11 or a natural disaster.

"Well now you might be thinking that X, Y, and Z are going to happen, but that's not what happened at all."

MacAllister said:

I'm not sure I can nail down the specific language, but it's that overall "everything was much grittier/harder/uglier/colder/seedier, then--and we walked uphill to our one-room schoolhouse, barefoot, in the snow...both ways."

Click to expand...

You forgot the part about how there was only one pair of shoes amongst all the children and they had to share, and how the soles were so thing one could pick up dimes with their toes while they wore them.

Things to Avoid

I think that by believing your memoir/autobiography is supposed to be a method in catharsis, or that you have abluted yourself from pain and/or burden simply by writing your life story should be avoided. It just doesn't happen, and I am very suspicious of people who talk about "a weight being lifted off their shoulders" due to writing an autobiography or their memoir. Now, this isn't to say there are NO therapeudic benefits from writing at all; but if you are writing about your life simply to let it all out, then I do not see that being much different from writing in a journal or diary. That could be kept to oneself, because the paying public may not see a reason to be empathic toward someone who is not "talking" to them.

I speak from personal experience. I have been writing my autobiography for the past three years, and one thing I kept telling myself is will I be comfortable enough to sit in the same room with someone who is reading my life story out loud? This question was pertinent to stepping outside of myself, especially since I was writing about abusive situations and touchy subjects. Also, it was mentioned in other threads that life stories about overcoming trauma are a dime a dozen; at the end of the day, an agent and publisher not only want to represent and sell important books, they want to represent and sell important books a significant amount of people are interested in reading. I know that can sound like "DUH," but it is too easy to be isolationist when one is writing down feelings on paper for the first time.

What's a sentence link?

I think one of the biggest mistakes you make when writing your life story is believing that you've got something important/new/interesting to say when you don't.
You have to give way to the emotion of the events, but you must also be objective about what happened. If you go on about "poor me my life was so hard" and don't step away to show how the events shaped you, then you'll turn off readers.